For various reasons, a Halo movie is probably never going to arrive on screens across the country. But that doesn’t mean Microsoft thinks there’s no market for it… so a Halo “digital feature project” will be arriving sometime this year.

It’s not really clear what form this will take, according to Joystiq, since all Microsoft will say is that Ridley Scott’s executive producing and television director Sergio Mimica-Gezzan (Battlestar Galactica) is at the directorial wheel. It won’t have anything to do with that Halo TV series Microsoft keeps vaguely talking about, either.

As for what it’s about, Microsoft isn’t sharing that, either. We are assuming there will be space marines, and they will fight aliens. Given the general direction of the franchise’s media, they will probably die nobly fighting aliens, actually. Pretty much everybody in the Halo universe who isn’t a game protagonist is a redshirt.

Still, this is actually pretty good news. The Halo franchise is actually at its best, on film, when Master Chief is pushed to the side. Forward Unto Dawn actually stands up as a movie removed completely from the games, for example. And it’s not like Microsoft doesn’t spend the cash to make these things watchable; previous ads for the game have been directed by Neill Blomkamp and David Fincher. So this will probably be worth a watch.

Hey, if nothing else, it’ll be better than most video game movies in the first place. Although admittedly, that’s a low bar.

Not really. You can easily get it down to 150mil. We are talking about the universe Halo. Not a step by step live coverage of the game. Hell if anything trying to essentially film the game would be the worst possible move they can male. But doing an awesome space action that starts with the first contact war and ends right to the point where they discover Halo? I can see that